Quotes About Pharmaceuticals

A 2016 study found that purchasing even a single meal with a value of $20 for a physician can be enough to change the way that he prescribes. And for all their lip service to the contrary, the Sacklers didn't need studies to tell them this.

Heroin was created by the same research team that invented aspirin.

In some cases, these communities also happened to have long-standing problems with prescription drug abuse. In some parts of Appalachia, people would pair an OxyContin with a Valium—one of Richard Sackler's pills and one of his uncle Arthur's. They called this "the Cadillac high.

According to a study by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity, Purdue and other drug companies that manufacture opioid painkillers spent over $700 million between 2006 and 2015 on lobbying in Washington and in all fifty states. The combined spending of these groups amounted to roughly eight times what the gun lobby spent. (By comparison, during the same period, the small handful of groups pushing for limits on opioid prescribing spent $4 million

Like casino employees talking about an especially profligate gambler, the sales reps referred to these doctors as "whales.

It was Arthur Sackler who would be credited not just with this campaign but with revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising. In the words of one of his longtime employees at McAdams, when it came to the marketing of pharmaceuticals, "Arthur invented the wheel.

He worried about what he described as "an unwholesome entanglement" between the people who prescribe our medicines and the people who make and market them.

No single individual did more to shape the character of medical advertising than the multi-talented Dr. Arthur Sackler." It was Arthur, the citation continued, who brought "the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.

The company literally could not make OxyContin fast enough to sell it.

Between 1994 and 2015, the quota of oxycodone that the DEA permitted to be legally manufactured was raised thirty-six times. A subsequent report by the inspector general of the Justice Department criticized the DEA for being "slow to respond to the dramatic increase in opioid abuse.

They "duped the FDA, saying OxyContin lasted twelve hours," Moore said. "They lied about the addictive properties. And they did all this to grow the opioid market, to make it okay to jump in the water. Then some of these other companies, they saw that the water was warm. And they said, 'Okay, we can jump in, too.

The Sacklers took the view that the same should go for OxyContin. To the degree that people are misusing the drug and overdosing, the blame lies with any number of potentially irresponsible parties—the prescribing doctor, the wholesaler, the pharmacist, the trafficker, the abuser, the addicted person—but not with the manufacturer. Not with Purdue. Much less the Sacklers.

Roche hadn't just blithely assumed that the powerful drugs it was about to introduce to the public would be safe: the company had deliberately obfuscated evidence to the contrary. In

course, OxyContin was stronger than morphine. That was a simple fact of chemistry—but one that the company would need to carefully obscure.

So without alerting the FDA, much less asking for permission, Purdue started manufacturing MS Contin at a plant in New Jersey and offered it for sale in October 1984.

The Sacklers had already been rich, by any measure. But with the introduction of their first painkiller, they suddenly became a lot richer.

Barbara Moulton who had spent five years as a drug examiner at the FDA before resigning in protest. The agency had "failed utterly" in its task of policing the way prescription drugs were marketed and sold, she testified. Moulton described an environment at the FDA of unrelenting pressure from the drug companies and a culture in which regulators, rather than regulate the drug companies and their products, showed slavish deference to the private sector.

Richard's cousin Kathe Sackler would claim that it was she who first suggested oxycodone

Having sold some $35 billion worth of OxyContin over two decades, the company might now be down, according to press reports, to as little as $500 million in cash.

The Sacklers have done a pretty good job of sucking the life out of Purdue," she said. "Year after year, month after month, they were draining hundreds of millions of dollars." All that was left at this point, she said, was "essentially a shell.

Your priority is to sell, sell, sell OxyContin.

It was not just OxyContin that was problematic, Berman continued, but Arthur's legacy as well. "The Sackler name is a problem, whether it's the Arthur Sackler name, or all the Sackler names," he said.

But the truth was, Librium and Valium were marketed using such a variety of gendered mid-century tropes—the neurotic singleton, the frazzled housewife, the joyless career woman, the menopausal shrew—that as the historian Andrea Tone noted in her book The Age of Anxiety, what Roche's tranquilizers really seemed to offer was a quick fix for the problem of "being female." Roche

As the negative publicity continued to swirl around OxyContin, Richard Sackler was privately seething. "The whole thing is a sham," a sympathetic friend reassured him. If people die because they abuse the drug, "then good riddance.